Designing for disconnected environments can seem like a niche concern — something only relevant for the extreme of specialty use-cases.

But here’s the catch:

The design principles that make software resilient in airgapped environments also make it more robust, secure, and reliable in connected ones.

When you design for failure, restriction, and constraint — you build systems that are prepared for the reality of even the best - infrastructure, configuration and every detail between.

You would be surprised at how often this catches a project off-guard - or maybe you wouldn’t. I will say, there is a healthy spectrum of udnerstanding across even the CNCF landscape and the maintainers and contributors therein. Some have a good baseline knowledge - some are completely surprised that that you would want to use their project in the airgap.

When you ask “Will this project work in an airgapped environment?” they usually respond quickly - “ofcourse it will”.

Then you clarify - have you tested all the features of your project in a mock-airgap environment? The answer is most often “no” and then the fun conversation happens.

“Well actually this portion of the functionality relies on public infrastructure - and we’ve never tested to ensure it responds offline accordingly.

Cloud Assumptions Are Fragile

Most cloud-native architectures implicitly assume:

  • Persistent connectivity to upstream APIs.
  • Access to public container registries.
  • Federated identity via internet-based IdPs.
  • Observability pipelines with external collectors.
  • CI/CD driven by hosted SaaS services.

These work well - until they don’t - and hey… we can’t blame them. Often there is a need to establish boundaries around what your application does or does not do. The critical piece the follows is whether it can do its core function without connectivity…

Outages happen. Networks degrade. Credentials expire. Supply chain links go stale. And when they do, fragile assumptions become operational risks.

Airgap design removes those assumptions up front.

What Does Airgap Design Look Like?

Airgap-native systems are built with certain principles from the start:

1. Self-Containment

All required components — images, configs, secrets, policies — are bundled together.

In connected systems, this reduces:

  • Cold-start delays from registry fetches.
  • Breakage when upstream repos go down.
  • Deployment drift from unintended version mismatches.

Your supply chain only becomes stronger when we start to really combine all of the artifacts into a deterministic package. No separation of the runtime and the orchestration - everything require to run an application in a consistent format.

2. Explicit Supply Chains

Airgapped systems can’t rely on implicit trust. Every artifact needs a known provenance.

This benefits connected systems by:

  • Enabling better auditability and SBOM integration.
  • Making it easier to trace vulnerabilities across dependency chains.
  • Supporting compliance - driven deployment pipelines.

We have been discussing shift-left and shift-down security for some time now. How do we start to embed some of these functions into the points of interest where they are most critical?

3. Decoupled Identity and Access

In disconnected systems, identity can’t depend on a cloud IdP. Local tokens, certs, and signed claims become the norm.

In connected environments, this:

  • Enables better identity failover and edge auth models.
  • Makes federated access patterns more flexible and resilient.
  • Encourages trust models by removing ambient trust in always-on IdPs.

4. Offline Observability

Airgapped systems must queue and retain telemetry for later sync. That encourages local-first logging, metrics, and tracing.

In connected systems, this:

  • Reduces observability dependency on network stability.
  • Improves incident investigation during outages.
  • Builds capacity for hybrid or multi-environment support.

5. Deployment Independence

Airgap delivery workflows favor immutable packages and reproducible environments.

In connected systems, this:

  • Lowers deployment variance across clusters or regions.
  • Enables faster disaster recovery and rehydration.
  • Makes blue-green or canary deployments more predictable.

6. Data Independence

There is no single source of truth for getting critical updates into these environments. Airgapped systems require data be independent from runtime such that it can be scrutinized and deployed repeatedly

In connected systems, this:

  • Creates pathways for auditable data update procedures
  • Ensures you are not solely reliant on a public service
  • Establishes better interface practices for where data is derived and stored

This enhances how we can audit and understand where data impacts runtime. Where data is the critical influencer of functionality we can reduce friction by providing automated and assisted processes to improve data workflows.

The Real World Is a Spectrum

Few systems are 100% online or offline. Most sit somewhere in between:

  • Field devices that sync once a day.
  • Remote branches with flaky VPN tunnels.
  • Enterprise networks with strict egress filtering.
  • Edge clusters that must run autonomously for weeks.

Designing with airgap principles prepares your software for real-world conditions — not just ideal lab setups.

“If your system can handle being disconnected, it can survive being degraded.”

Building for Resilience, Not Just Connectivity

Ultimately, airgap thinking is resilience thinking.

It forces you to:

  • Be explicit about dependencies.
  • Package your intentions.
  • Design for recovery without intervention.
  • Treat every part of the system as if it might fail.
  • Treat data as an influencer of runtime - rather than a baked-in assumption.

That’s not just useful for submarines or space missions. It’s how you build robust systems — anywhere.

Want to go deeper?

  • Check out the Zarf project for building packages that run across the spectrum
  • Join the #zarf channel in Kubernetes Slack
  • Or hit me up on socials to chat about the weirdest places you’ve deployed an app